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Quotations for TV Turnoff Week

Related Quotes Television Reading Laziness Health Exercise

All television is educational television. The question is: what is it teaching? ~Nicholas Johnson

TV. If kids are entertained by two letters, imagine the fun they'll have with twenty-six. Open your child's imagination. Open a book. ~Author Unknown

If you surveyed a hundred typical middle-aged Americans, I bet you'd find that only two of them could tell you their blood types, but every last one of them would know the theme song from The Beverly Hillbillies. ~Dave Barry

Books had instant replay long before televised sports. ~Bern Williams

If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger. ~Frank Lloyd Wright

If it weren't for the fact that the TV set and the refrigerator are so far apart, some of us wouldn't get any exercise at all. ~Joey Adams

The same media people that claim violence on TV doesn't influence people, are perfectly willing to sell you advertising time. ~Author Unknown

I wish there were a knob on the TV to turn up the intelligence. There's a knob called "brightness," but that doesn't work. ~Author Unknown

How can you put on a meaningful drama when, every fifteen minutes, proceedings are interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits with toilet paper? ~Rod Serling, quoted in Submitted for Your Approval, Public Broadcasting Station, 1995

Television has proved that people will look at anything rather than each other. ~Ann Landers

I find television to be very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go in the other room and read a book. ~Groucho Marx

We cannot blame the schools alone for the dismal decline in SAT verbal scores. When our kids come home from school do they pick up a book or do they sit glued to the tube, watching music videos? Parents, don't make the mistake of thinking your kid only learns between 9:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m. ~George Bush

No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting. ~Mary Wortley Montagu

If you came and you found a strange man... teaching your kids to punch each other, or trying to sell them all kinds of products, you'd kick him right out of the house, but here you are; you come in and the TV is on, and you don't think twice about it. ~Jerome Singer

A vigorous five-mile walk will do more good for an unhappy but otherwise healthy adult than all the medicine and psychology in the world. ~Paul Dudley White

Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers. ~Charles W. Eliot

Television: A medium - so called because it is neither rare nor well done. ~Ernie Kovacs

Television has changed a child from an irresistible force to an immovable object. ~Author Unknown

Today, watching television often means fighting, violence and foul language - and that's just deciding who gets to hold the remote control. ~Donna Gephart

Technology... is a queer thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other. ~C.P. Snow, New York Times, 15 March 1971

Television is an invention that permits you to be entertained in your living room by people you wouldn't have in your home. ~David Frost

What is being lost is the magic of the word. I am not an image person. Imagery belongs to another civilization: the caveman. Caveman couldn't express himself so he put images on walls. ~Elie Wiesel, 1995

Lord! when you sell a man a book you don't sell just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night - there's all heaven and earth in a book, a real book. ~Christopher Morley

Time has convinced me of one thing. Television is for appearing on, not looking at. ~Noel Coward, attributed

We can put it in its proper perspective by supposing that Gutenberg's great invention had been directed at printing only comic books. ~Robert M. Hutchins, News Summaries, 31 December 1977

The television, that insidious beast, that Medusa which freezes a billion people to stone every night, staring fixedly, that Siren which called and sang and promised so much and gave, after all, so little. ~Ray Bradbury, The Golden Apples of the Sun

The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them. ~Samuel Butler

Television: chewing gum for the eyes. ~Frank Lloyd Wright

I've never known any trouble that an hour's reading didn't assuage. ~Charles de Secondat, Baron de la Brède et de Montesquieu, Pensées Diverses

Every time you think television has hit its lowest ebb, a new type program comes along to make you wonder where you thought the ebb was. ~Art Buchwald, "Adding Insult to Injury," Have I Ever Lied to You?, 1966

Ninety-eight percent of American homes have TV sets, which means the people in the other 2% have to generate their own sex and violence. ~Attributed to Gene Baylos

To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you, and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations - such is a pleasure beyond compare. ~Kenko Yoshida

The smallest bookstore still contains more ideas of worth than have been presented in the entire history of television. ~Andrew Ross

Television has raised writing to a new low. ~Samuel Goldwyn

I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in. ~John Muir, 1913, in L.M. Wolfe, ed., John Muir, John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, 1938

Television was not intended to make human beings vacuous, but it is an emanation of their vacuity. ~Malcolm Muggeridge

Everything is for the eye these days - TV, Life, Look, the movies. Nothing is just for the mind. The next generation will have eyeballs as big as cantaloupes and no brain at all. ~Fred Allen

Television is now so desperately hungry for material that they're scraping the top of the barrel. ~Gore Vidal

What compels you to stare, night after night, at all the glittering hokum that has been deliberately put together for you? ~J.B. Priestley

There are days when any electrical appliance in the house, including the vacuum cleaner, seems to offer more entertainment possibilities than the TV set. ~Harriet van Horne

Theatre is life. Cinema is art. Television is furniture. ~Author Unknown

I have had my television aerials removed. It is the moral equivalent of a prostate operation. ~Malcolm Muggeridge

Television is really what we've been looking for all our lives.... [It's] perfect. You turn a few knobs and lean back and drain your mind of all thought. And there you are watching the bubbles in the primordial ooze. ~Raymond Chandler, 1950

Books - the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity. ~George Steiner

All television is children's television. ~Richard P. Adler

Art is moral passion married to entertainment. Moral passion without entertainment is propaganda, and entertainment without moral passion is television. ~Rita Mae Brown

If you read a lot of books, you're considered well-read. But if you watch a lot of TV, you're not considered well-viewed. ~Lily Tomlin

I suppose I should get a VCR, but the only thing I like about television is its ephemerality. ~P.J. O'Rourke

These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves. From each of them goes out its own voice... and just as the touch of a button on our set will fill the room with music, so by taking down one of these volumes and opening it, one can call into range the voice of a man far distant in time and space, and hear him speaking to us, mind to mind, heart to heart. ~Gilbert Highet

I have come to the feeling about television the way I do about hamburgers: I eat a lot of hamburgers and I don't remember a single one of them. ~John Barrow, 1973

When television came roaring in after the war (World War II) they did a little school survey asking children which they preferred and why - television or radio. And there was this 7-year-old boy who said he preferred radio "because the pictures were better." ~Alistair Cooke

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Last modified 2007 Oct 14 Sun 12:08 PDT

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